Civic Forum?
Posted By: November 22, 2013
Should the Civic Forum be revived in Northern Ireland.The Belfast columnist gives a resounding “NO.”TALKING SHOP A ROUNDABOUT WAY TO CREATE AN OPPOSITIONBrian Feeney. Irish News ( Belfast). Wednesday, November 20, 2013
YOU might be forgiven for thinking that the reference to the forgotten and unlamented Civic Forum in Alasdair McDonnell’s party conference speech was a characteristic puff of vapour but it’s now clear it wasn’t.In Monday’s assembly debate the SDLP’s MLAs have now endorsed his call for the talking shop to be “re-established and reconvened”.
McDonnell said the Civic Forum was necessary so that “the views of ordinary people will be heard at the heart” of what he mistakenly calls “government”.
This misguided belief is a piece of nonsense.
The Civic Forum, in case you don’t know, and there’s no reason why you should, last met in 2002. It had nothing to do with that awful phrase, ‘ordinary people’, but everything to do with a concept devised by members of the Women’s Coalition who couldn’t get elected in enough numbers to influence anything.
They called the notion behind the talking shop “participative democracy”, a phrase repeated by one of the MLAs supporting the call to restore it.
The officials at the NIO who invented, encouraged and artificially sustained the Women’s Coalition, including rigging the election system to the 1996 Northern Ireland Forum, helped the Women’s Coalition and Alliance Party to foist the Civic Forum on the Good Friday Agreement.
Far from being anything to do with ‘ordinary people’ the forum was comprised of representatives of business, trade unions, agriculture, fisheries, culture, community relations and so on.
Guess what sort of people these sectors chose? Time-servers in their own organisations, activists, political junkies too important to join political parties,
people who thought they were important but couldn’t understand why their views were not consulted before Stormont took any decision, the sort of obsessives who ruined the Human Rights Commission, people exasperated with the ignorance and stupidity of your ‘ordinary’ assembly member who, believe it or not, was in fact more like an ‘ordinary person’ than any member of the Civic Forum.
It was a total waste of time and, more importantly, money. First and deputy first ministers conducted a review of the Civic Forum and in 2011 concluded correctly: “There was no widespread desire for a return to a structure of the size and expense of the Civic Forum as it had previously operated. Accordingly, there have been no meetings of the Civic Forum during this assembly mandate, which has also resulted in considerable savings to the public purse.”
The best figure for the saving is half a million pounds a year.
The forum was a consultative body but no-one can give an example of anything proposed as a result of its consultation which was adopted. The question is, why have a consultative body when all the institutions and organisations represented on the forum can present their consultations as part of the procedure for any executive proposal?
We heard claims this week that the Civic Forum is a “key part” of the Good Friday Agreement. It isn’t. It has not been operating for a decade and no-one has noticed, nor has its absence hampered anything. Perhaps the real reason for the recent renewal of interest in the forum is a naive belief on the part of Sinn Fein and the SDLP, both of whom supported its restoration this week, that the views of so-called “civic society” expressed by such a forum would embarrass the DUP into acting decently and fulfilling their political duties. Hah!
We are told the new reason the Civic Forum is necessary is not because it’s a “key part” of the agreement but because “politicians have failed”.
This assertion is dangerous stuff. It seems the attempt to resurrect a Civic Forum is really a roundabout way to create an opposition at Stormont, an opposition the SDLP in particular believes will agree with its analysis of the current malaise.
In other words we would all have to endure and pay for another 60 people on top of the 108 assembly members blasting hot air around Stormont, the only difference being the extra 60 parasites wouldn’t be able to do anything.
Even more dangerous than undermining elected politicians is the prospect that within a very short time the Civic Forum would ask to expand its role. Just what we need.
Civic Forum?Should the Civic Forum be revived in Northern Ireland.The Belfast columnist gives a resounding “NO.”TALKING SHOP A ROUNDABOUT WAY TO CREATE AN OPPOSITIONBrian Feeney. Irish News ( Belfast). Wednesday, November 20, 2013
YOU might be forgiven for thinking that the reference to the forgotten and unlamented Civic Forum in Alasdair McDonnell’s party conference speech was a characteristic puff of vapour but it’s now clear it wasn’t.In Monday’s assembly debate the SDLP’s MLAs have now endorsed his call for the talking shop to be “re-established and reconvened”.
McDonnell said the Civic Forum was necessary so that “the views of ordinary people will be heard at the heart” of what he mistakenly calls “government”.
This misguided belief is a piece of nonsense.
The Civic Forum, in case you don’t know, and there’s no reason why you should, last met in 2002. It had nothing to do with that awful phrase, ‘ordinary people’, but everything to do with a concept devised by members of the Women’s Coalition who couldn’t get elected in enough numbers to influence anything.
They called the notion behind the talking shop “participative democracy”, a phrase repeated by one of the MLAs supporting the call to restore it.
The officials at the NIO who invented, encouraged and artificially sustained the Women’s Coalition, including rigging the election system to the 1996 Northern Ireland Forum, helped the Women’s Coalition and Alliance Party to foist the Civic Forum on the Good Friday Agreement.
Far from being anything to do with ‘ordinary people’ the forum was comprised of representatives of business, trade unions, agriculture, fisheries, culture, community relations and so on.
Guess what sort of people these sectors chose? Time-servers in their own organisations, activists, political junkies too important to join political parties,
people who thought they were important but couldn’t understand why their views were not consulted before Stormont took any decision, the sort of obsessives who ruined the Human Rights Commission, people exasperated with the ignorance and stupidity of your ‘ordinary’ assembly member who, believe it or not, was in fact more like an ‘ordinary person’ than any member of the Civic Forum.
It was a total waste of time and, more importantly, money. First and deputy first ministers conducted a review of the Civic Forum and in 2011 concluded correctly: “There was no widespread desire for a return to a structure of the size and expense of the Civic Forum as it had previously operated. Accordingly, there have been no meetings of the Civic Forum during this assembly mandate, which has also resulted in considerable savings to the public purse.”
The best figure for the saving is half a million pounds a year.
The forum was a consultative body but no-one can give an example of anything proposed as a result of its consultation which was adopted. The question is, why have a consultative body when all the institutions and organisations represented on the forum can present their consultations as part of the procedure for any executive proposal?
We heard claims this week that the Civic Forum is a “key part” of the Good Friday Agreement. It isn’t. It has not been operating for a decade and no-one has noticed, nor has its absence hampered anything. Perhaps the real reason for the recent renewal of interest in the forum is a naive belief on the part of Sinn Fein and the SDLP, both of whom supported its restoration this week, that the views of so-called “civic society” expressed by such a forum would embarrass the DUP into acting decently and fulfilling their political duties. Hah!
We are told the new reason the Civic Forum is necessary is not because it’s a “key part” of the agreement but because “politicians have failed”.
This assertion is dangerous stuff. It seems the attempt to resurrect a Civic Forum is really a roundabout way to create an opposition at Stormont, an opposition the SDLP in particular believes will agree with its analysis of the current malaise.
In other words we would all have to endure and pay for another 60 people on top of the 108 assembly members blasting hot air around Stormont, the only difference being the extra 60 parasites wouldn’t be able to do anything.
Even more dangerous than undermining elected politicians is the prospect that within a very short time the Civic Forum would ask to expand its role. Just what we need.
